There is another mischief, arising out of ephemeral literature, which was noticed by the same great author.  “Wheresoever manners and fashions are corrupted,” says he, “language is.  It imitates the public riot.  The excess of feasts and apparel are the notes of a sick state; and the wantonness of language of a sick mind.”  This was the observation of a man well versed in the history of the ancients and in their literature.  The evil prevailed in his time to a considerable degree; but it was not permanent, because it proceeded rather from the affectation of a few individuals than from any general cause:  the great poets were free from it; and our prose writers then, and till the end of that century, were preserved, by their sound studies and logical habits of mind, from any of those faults into which men fall who write loosely because they think loosely.  The pedantry of one class and the colloquial vulgarity of another had their day; the faults of each were strongly contrasted, and better writers kept the mean between them.  More lasting effect was produced by translators, who in later times have corrupted our idiom as much as, in early ones, they enriched our vocabulary; and to this injury the Scotch have greatly contributed; for composing in a language which is not their mother tongue, they necessarily acquired an artificial and formal style, which, not so much through the merit of a few as owing to the perseverance of others, who for half a century seated themselves on the bench of criticism, has almost superseded the vernacular English of Addison and Swift.  Our journals, indeed, have been the great corrupters of our style, and continue to be so, and not for this reason only.  Men who write in newspapers, and magazines, and reviews, write for present effect; in most cases this is as much their natural and proper aim as it would be in public speaking; but when it is so they consider, like public speakers, not so much what is accurate or just, either in matter or manner, as what will be acceptable to those whom they address.  Writing also under the excitement of emulation and rivalry, they seek, by all the artifices and efforts of an ambitious style, to dazzle their readers; and they are wise in their generation, experience having shown that common minds are taken by glittering faults, both in prose and verse, as larks are with looking-glasses.

In this school it is that most writers are now trained; and after such training anything like an easy and natural movement is as little to be looked for in their compositions as in the step of a dancing master.  To the vices of style which are thus generated there must be added the inaccuracies inevitably arising from haste, when a certain quantity of matter is to be supplied for a daily or weekly publication which allows of no delay—­the slovenliness that confidence, as well as fatigue and inattention, will produce—­and the barbarisms, which are the effect of ignorance, or that smattering of knowledge which serves only to render ignorance presumptuous.  These are the causes of corruption in our current style; and when these are considered there would be ground for apprehending that the best writings of the last century might become as obsolete as yours in the like process of time, if we had not in our Liturgy and our Bible a standard from which it will not be possible wholly to depart.